My colleague Thomas Husson wrote a report last year in which he looked at ”The Future Of Application Stores.” Overall, uptake of apps is limited: Only 15% of European smartphone owners report downloading an app on a monthly basis. By contrast, 64% of European iPhone users download apps on a monthly basis. Looking at what consumers are interested in most, Forrester's Technographics® data shows that games, music, weather, news, and social networking top the list for both iPhone and other smartphone users.

Companies that want to develop a mobile strategy should begin with a solid understanding of how mobile-advanced their brand's consumers are and will be. Mobile Technographics® places consumers into groups based on their mobile phone usage. The groups are defined by the extent to which the mobile phone user has adopted mobile data services, the frequency of use of these services, and the level of sophistication in the mobile applications he or she uses.

I had the pleasure earlier this week of attending Lawson Software’s conference and user exchange, aka CUE, in Boston.

The midmarket ERP apps vendor had the singular misfortune to throw its annual user party at a time of great uncertainty for both Lawson and its customers. Lawson has yet to respond to an unsolicited $1.8 billion acquisition offer from ERP rival Infor, aside from acknowledging receipt of the offer on March 11. Despite the Infor elephant in the room, CUE was a good-humored affair. Lawson execs exhibited grace under fire while customers expressed concern but remained cheerfully stoic and pragmatic.

Do you think Lawson will end up part of Infor? Alternatively, will it remain independent or will it be bought by a private equity firm and no longer be publicly traded à la Epicor? As apps vendors try to navigate fluctuating revenue mixes — rising subscriptions versus falling maintenance — being privately held may prove to be an attractive option.

Lawson is currently evaluating whether to break out subscription revenue as a separate line item in its next fiscal year. Of its 4,500 largely on-premise customers, around 350 use a Lawson SaaS product, the fruit of purchases such as Enwisen and Healthvision. Like other apps players, Lawson’s embraced Amazon.com’s EC2 as the cloud infrastructure for its HCM, M3 and S3 ERP apps. Several Lawson cloud services early adopters at CUE talked about their organizations’ experiences and there were some similarities in those stories:

They faced hardware refreshes and/or obsolescence of the app and database versions they used